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I think this whole "things I hate in $language" misses a very important point.

There is an immensely rich universe of languages you can chose from today. If you want Lisp-ish lambdas and macros, you should, by all means, go with Lisp. If you want to build your own DSL, you may as well chose Ruby. If you want pythonic indentation-as-structure, you should go with Python and, if you love the "do this if that" thing, you should consider Perl.

Having said that, I would love if Python threads had better support for multi-processors. It's not like changing syntax and turning Python into something it isn't, it's just properly implementing something that should be there from day 1.

1 comments

I don't think it misses anything. My post is mainly around things I want to make better, to make python better. I am definitely a fan of using the right tool for the right job: that means using the language which fits the domain. This is why I don't think arguments for "more functional programming" features or "be erlang" hold a lot of water for Python; if that's what you want, you need to go use those tools.

I agree with your points and, having done a lot of Zope/Plone programming in the past, your #1 is by far my #1 too. More than once I have sworn if I knew enough of the inner workings of CPython, I would solve the problem myself, even if it took years of labor, even if I had to rewrite each and every module out there ;-)

I think my rather inadequately thought out response was because most of the comments here in HN were about changing Python into something else. I am truly sorry I implied your article was about turning Python into something unnatural and I most certainly owe you an apology.

It's nothing. But I wholly agree that many of the comments here and elsewhere are very much in the vein of "man wouldn't it be great if python was OCaml?!!", which is about as useful a comment as a hole in my head.

Python isn't OCaml. It's not Prolog, Haskell, awk, or SQL either, and trying to bend it into those is largely missing the point.

A more interesting question is, "In what circumstances is Python an excellent fit, and OCaml a poor one?", and vice versa.